a language of one’s own making

At the age of seven, my mom retaught me how to read. Not in English–with picture books and Sesame Street–but in Latin. Some correlation between being homeschooled and having nerds for parents made my education in a dead language plausible before I even knew how to spell the word museum. The fact that the only practice I could ever get speaking it would be with college professors, underpaid private high school teachers, and historians was inconsequential.

A small issue? I remember none of it. Well, I remember felis, which means cat, but I even had to Google to check that I was spelling it correctly. Latin exists as a splotch of flashcards and fill-in-the-blank sentences in a glossy beige softback, but it does not exist in the left hemisphere of my brain.

• • •

I can count in English how many years passed before my dad started teaching us the French he learned as an elective in college, but if you wanted it in any other language, I would be hard-pressed. We started using Duolingo. We stopped using Duolingo. I knew the words bonjour and chat and amie and bonne nuit. I could tell people what my name was (je m’appelle Grace!), but I still didn’t know how to find la salles de bain.

Slowly, I figured out colors, food, articles of clothing. Learning to count was a painfully slow process, as I rebelled every time a number was taught. The human race, after all, does have a numeral system, and even without a pen and paper, I have ten perfectly fine fingers (ten additional toes, if necessary) to indicate a vast range of numbers. To put it bluntly, anytime I felt challenged by French, I shrugged it off as unworthy of my time and effort. Chairs and mustard didn’t need to have a gender, verbs didn’t need to have irregular conjugations, and I didn’t need to practice any of this out loud. Doing so would have made it clear that my accent was the love child of Ratatouille and The Incredibles‘ Bomb Voyage.

Around the age of sixteen, however, I became indoctrinated by my own vision of creating a language from scratch. Not just an alphabet, a completely constructed language.

(J. R. R. Tolkien did it.)

(I supposed I could too.)

I held this ambition for less than a year, but this fleeting thought led me to study the structures of different languages, mainly Irish Gaelic.

• • •

Irish Gaelic isn’t the most sought after in terms of language–lacking the scholarly notability of Latin, Hebrew, or Greek; or the practicality of French, Spanish, or Mandarin. The appeal for me started with Ireland’s folklore–the fae, Celtic water horses, banshees–and progressed with the fact that no one I knew knew anything about the Irish language. No one could accuse me of being bad at something they didn’t understand, and I was counting on that. Following my impeccable track record, I now only remember that bean means woman and cailín means girl.

So. Clearly, there’s a problem here.

I could cite my impressive lack of progress as a sign of some innate laziness of the self–after all, using the English language to write with requires much less exertion than any other language. My thoughts and my dreams and the words that I spit out when I’m not meaning to say anything are all English. But, at the risk of letting myself off too easily, I think there may be a deeper issue.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate these languages. At different points in time, I’ve been utterly enchanted by them, or at the very least, by the idea of them. But maybe that’s my problem. The English language–that I have been submerged in since existing–is wholly inadequate to express everything I wish to express; the thoughts and concepts that fill my mind know no such boundaries. So how could a foreign language ever stand a chance when I can’t even use my native tongue right?

Maybe I had it right at sixteen, and what I need is not a preexisting language to learn, but something new entirely. A language that can bottle the way it feels to be the only one awake at 3:40 A.M., darkness draped over me like a blanket and poetry burning a hole through the wax in my chest. Maybe the only words I was meant to speak are from a language of my own making.